Research Methods for Cultural Studies

6 michael pickering
been considered a primary resource, providing evidence of and giving insight
into everyday cultures, past and present. At the same time, as a cultural category
and a critical tool, it has been subject to trenchant criticism, particularly
at the hands of poststructuralists and those writing from related theoretical
positions. In the first chapter, I argue for the continuing importance of the
concept of experience in cultural studies. This arises out of the tensions and
conflicts over what is made of experience in our understanding of the social
world. The concept is approached through its dual qualities, such as those
of proximity and distance, and situated and mediated participation. Various
examples of these are discussed throughout the chapter. For me, the greatest
significance of experience in cultural analysis is as an intermediary category
coming between ways of being and ways of knowing. This connects with how
it is discussed methodologically. Experience is the ground on which researcher
and researched come together in some way across the rifts and gulfs between
their life histories. The chapter discusses how this ground may be approached
and how it affects the research relation. It is a recurrent theme throughout the
book.
Stories are central to the ways in which people make sense of their experience
and interpret the social world. In everyday life and popular culture, we are
continually engaged in narratives of one kind or another. They fill our days and
form our lives. They link us together socially and allow us to bring past and
present into relative coherence. In the second chapter, Steph Lawler examines
the importance of narrative for cultural studies research. Her concern is
twofold. Firstly, she addresses the ways in which stories circulate socially as
cultural resources, how they operate in our everyday lives as organising devices
through which we interpret and constitute the world. Secondly, she is concerned
with how researchers can approach and themselves interpret these narratives.
Beginning with a definition of narrative as consisting of the three
elements of characters, action and plot, she builds up a general case that shows
the major strengths of narrative as a critical tool and analytical method. She
then turns to consideration of a particularly tricky problem – the truth status
of narratives. Does it matter whether narratives about the social world are true
in the sense that they refer, in however mediated a manner, to an empirical
world ‘out there’? Are narrative truths local and contingent, rather than universal
and absolute? In what ways are truth claims politically significant? To
engage with some of the complexities of these questions, Lawler uses the
example of Fragments, a narrative account of Holocaust survival, written by
Binjamin Wilkormirski, which was subsequently revealed as a false memoir.
The extent to which it matters that Fragments is false depends on a central
question of narrative research – what can narratives do? The chapter concludes
by outlining different ways of reading narratives, and different stages in the
production of narrative and the meanings that can be made of it.